One of the main reason WordPress has so much success is the availability of so many plugins to do your work.
SEO is a one full time task which requires proper attention. There are so many plugins for SEO which can help you doing your work but nothing better than the plugins which you can setup once and forget about them.
I always like one time effort, so I have tried to list few plugins for SEO, which you can setup once and they can do their work behind the scene. It is like virtual assistants for your SEO work, who will make sure that your blog is neat and tidy.
My List of Must Have Plugins for SEO
1. Broken Link Checker
This is the very first plugins which is a must have for your SEO work. Broken links are not good for SEO, it can decrease your rankings.
Broken links can be there for many reasons, like people who left comments on your site has abandon their blogs or the services you linked earlier is no longer active.
Good thing about this plugin is that it works behind the scene and make sure all links in your blog is working.
Once you setup and activate this plugin, it starts taking care of your blog. Based on the activity on your blog, you can setup the frequency for checking the broken links. I prefer setting the frequency at least once in a week.
There are some other good settings, like it can automatically stop search engine following the broken links or it can send an automatic notification to administer for broken links.
So once setup is done, you can forget about it, if there is any broken link then it will send a notification and takes care of the search engines. Isn’t it cool?
Other good thing is that you can correct the broken links from the plugin screen only, you can unlink them or mark it as not broken.
2. SEO Slugs
This is another must have plugins for SEO. It takes care of the URL’s of your posts by removing stop words from them.
As soon as you save your post in draft, it updates the URL, which makes it easy for you to do your work. When you go for checking URL, you will not find stop words there and you can just update it to what you want.
What is a stop words?
[box type=”info”]According to Wikipedia – For some search machines, these are some of the most common, short function words, such as the, is, at, which and on. In this case, stop words can cause problems when searching for phrases that include them, particularly in names such as ‘The Who’, ‘The The’, or ‘Take That’. Other search engines remove some of the most common words—including lexical words, such as “want”—from query in order to improve performance.[/box]
So you would also want to remove these words from your URL’s and this plugin does that work for you.
3. Google XML Sitemap
This is another must have plugins for SEO work. Once setup it will generate the XML sitemap for your blog and will notify the search engines.
Good thing about the plugin is there are lot of customization options like what you want to include in the sitemap, which category or pages you want to ignore or what weight you want to assign to each element. These needs to be setup once and it will start taking care of it automatically.
You can include the sitemap to webmaster and rest assured that your pages will be indexed in search engine.
4. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a complete cache plugin for your blog, it does improve blog loading speed. It is really important to set it up correctly. It has all aspect of caching included and even CDN support if you are using it.
Blog loading speed is an important factor in Google’s algorithm and Google has provided a tool Page Speed to test it. This Plugin does provide an interface to the tool and add a dashboard widget which tells you the Page Speed Score and suggestions for improvement.
It does support browser caching which can save server bandwidth also. We need to be careful while using the browser caching as it will be stored on clients machine but it can work great for the things like images. It allows you to specify expiration policy so you can decide how long you want to keep things there.
Once downloaded on client machine it can be referenced from there itself to load the page fast. Images use lot of bandwidth while loading the page but if you can reference it from client machine then it can improve the speed drastically.
5. Redirection
This is another good plugins for SEO which can keep an tab on changed URL’s on your blog. If you do make changes on the URL’s more often then this is a must have. It manages 301 redirects for your blog.
It runs in background and keeps track of URL changes on your blog, if it found any changes it automatically add an redirection from old URL to new URL. No manual work is needed to add the redirects, once setup it will do that automatically.
It will save you from unwanted page not found errors. It does provide some other redirection methods if you are looking for them.
6. Seopressor
This is a good plugin for on-page SEO though that is not fully automatic. The plugin will check the on page contents for any specific keywords and check the on-page SEO factors for that keyword.
It provides an numeric score and suggestions to improve the on-page SEO, which is a good way to keep an check on your on-page SEO activities. If you do keyword analysis before writing the post than its a good plugin to check the written content.
It does some automatic stuff also like bold, italic and underline your keyword in the content, adding ALT tag to images, adding rel=nofollow tag to external link etc.
If you want you can check my complete list of plugins and WordPress resources.
There are so many plugins for SEO, What other plugins are you using?
Do you really think SEO pressor is any way required ? if you know the basics of SEO.
Hi Sanjeev,
I am using W3c total cache & SEO slugs on my blog.I don’t use broken link checker but after your recommendation, I have tried it and it is also awesome.
Thanks for the great plugin list.
Thanks Bhavesh, Broken link checker is good and can help in correcting issue in the site. Glad you like the list.
Redirection is an awesome plugin that will eliminate the hassle of logging in to your server and trying to do it manually, awesome post by the way.
Yes, I also like the flexibility provided by redirection and easy of use.
Sanjeev you going to love EasyWPSEO…One of the best in the market for onpage optimization…Thesis is SEO friendly framework but has nothing to do with Keyword optimization…
I am trying EasyWP SEO right now and I am really liking the plugin. I agree Thesis does not have to do anything for Keyword Optimization and we do need something for that…EasyWP SEO is a good alternative for that.
Useful list Sanjeev..here is my addition:
SEO smart link: Useful for internal linking
SEO image : Useful for adding alt tag to images
Smush.it: Compresses images for faster loading of page.. (reduced the size but dont compromise on quality)
I have used SEO Smart link and Smush.it, though now I am compressing images offline before uploading them, both are great plugins. Will check for SEO image…
@Sanjeev Which tool you are using for offline compression?
I use Office Picture Manager, it has a compression option for web pages and it does a good work, though sometime it can reduce quality also.
Great list of tools. Indeed such tools will make our SEO job faster and easier. Sadly those tools aren’t available for free wordpress blogs.
I agree Rick, these should be made available for the free option but this is how WordPress is making some money…
WordPress is one of the best CMS to build websites, and is practically optimized for search engines, and some plugin we can position ourselves very quickly in the first place. A very good plugin for SEO is All in One SEO Pack, this plugin for me is one of the most important gap is much more like the ones listed here but if we want to position quickly I think one of the best is All in One Seo Pack with SEOMetrico which is very good.
Well I bid you all are well
I agree Rizwan, WordPress is really great. I have not tried All in one SEO pack till now as I was using Wordperss SEO by Yoast before and that is also an amazing plugin. With the thesis inbuilt SEO functionality, I have removed that also and using some other plugins to do my work.
Looks like I need to give All in one SEO a try at any of my blog.
Hi Sanjeev, very good list of plugins. I use most of them. Haven’t used the SEO Slugs however.
The broken link checker seems to work quite well, but it hasn’t been perfect and it has missed the odd one.
Thanks for your great suggestions.
Best
Jayne
Ya, Broken link checker can miss once in a while, it also depends what links we have checked in settings. But it does come back in the next check cycles.
PS: Your blog URL was wrong, it was missing a dot. Broken link checker caught it and I have corrected that now..
Great post Sanjeev,
Great plug ins indeed to optimize your site. Thanks for sharing, automation is so helpful and key within any business.
Julie
automation is the key for any business, we can’t keep doing the same stuff.
I use 3 out of the 6 plugins you mentioned. But I liked “SEO slug” I was not aware about it. I know that stopping words are bad for SEO, But we can also edit it manually as installing too many plugins slows down the site.
Hi Kunal, I agree many plugins may slow the blog but most of the plugins which I have listed here runs on admin side so they have very little or no impact on client side.
Slugs can be changed manually, but I prefer getting clean slug and then updating it according to my need.
I agree W3c total cache is my favorite. You can really increase the speeds tremendously, when it comes to google even milliseconds count. Though Image cache is an issue I would want to be addressed.
I think All-in-one-SEO plugin is one of the best plugins for SEO too. You can manage optimize everything from the dashboard. I have more than 700 posts and keeping up with them can be dicy.
Overall everything you mentioned is a per-requisite and must be followed for a good foundation blog.
I am not using any complete package for SEO as Thesis is preloaded with lot of SEO features and make the life simple. I am using in-build features and some plugins to achieve the complete package features.
Redirection is a great 301 redirect tool, but learning the little tips and tricks you can do in the .htaccess file is really easy. Have you tried SuperCache? It is another way to help decrease page load time.
I tried Super Cache, it is also a great plugin but I found that Total Cache has some advanced settings and once configured correctly it can aid a lot.
The thing I like about Redirection is, it watches for the changes. No manual work involved other then installing it.
Have you used the compression functions that you can implement in your .htaccess file? Do the plugins for wordpress work better?
Yes, I do use the compression. W3 total cache you can specify that with a check-box and it takes care of rest. Even it does allow you to choose which files you want to compress.
I actually use SEPressor and it is superb
Makes getting your posts to Google page 1 eashy
Sanjeev you have put together a good list of essential wordpress plugins for SEO
Thanks, I tried to list what I found useful for me.
I have used, or continue to use, some of the plugins that you mentioned. I use the Broken Link Checker on occasion, but find that it can slow down my blog as it checks for links. I enable it when I want to perform another check.
For SEO, I use Yoast’s WordPress SEO as I find it easy to use and I am not burdened down with a lot of options. I like an SEO plugin that can handle most of work for me without my input.
Paul, I have always left broken link checker on but I have increased the duration to make it run once in 10 days. Also I have reduced the server load limit so it runs only when traffic is not there. Looks like it is working for me.
I also like WordPress SEO by Yoast, amazing plugin but I found that it is repeating many things which I can do with Thesis. So I uninstalled it and only updated specific functionality which I need.
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